Three up, one to go

We had more success with getting our TV repaired by Sound Techniques of Los Gatos; the culprit was a $1.50 capacitor in the power supply, and the total bill wasn’t unreasonable. So now we have two working TVs in the house, which seems almost excessive after so many years of only having one. Jeffrey has volunteered to take the second set, but it’s not going to happen — and there’s no cable outlet in his room anyway, so it wouldn’t do him any good!

If anyone has any experience with the Go-Video DVR5000 (sorry, Flash 5 is required), please drop me a line or mention it in the discussion group. The combination of a VCR and a DVD player in one box seems like a good idea for the second set, but I’m always eager to learn from other peoples’ experience.

Shabbat Shalom!

Cattle prods, anyone?

Now comes the hard part, trying to figure out what combinations will work. There are all sorts of things to worry about: similar Hebrew levels, similar levels of confidence in public speaking, big family versus small, whether you want to do a creative service or not, and so forth. I’m sure that no matter who we get paired with, both families will have to make some compromises, but in most cases, it shouldn’t be a big problem.

There were two families who might be hard to match up with, though. In one case, the father is a professional DJ and musician, and he plans to have a very elaborate party, and that doesn’t match up well with what we want. On the other hand, sharing a party with that family would certainly make for easy planning! Another parent might be even harder to work with — one of the questions was “if the kids are sharing a service, how can I keep the other family out of my pictures?” I thought about suggesting that cattle prods would be a good tool, but then I decided to keep my mouth shut.

The next few years are going to be interesting. And at the end of the time, not only will we have an official Jewish adult, but we’ll also have a teenager. Oy!

That business model is so last millenium!

We’ve been having near-shortages of electricity here in California for the past few days, and the utilities have had to buy power on the spot market to keep the lights on for us all. According to a story on KCBS radio, P G and E‘s John Nelson says the utility has been forced to pay 25 cents for a kilowatt but only allowed to charge customers 5 cents. The result has been a loss of almost $5 billion to the utility.

And here I thought it was only dot-com’s which thought that losing money on every transaction was a good idea.

Wine of the Day

1999 Buena Vista Sauvignon Blanc, $5.99 at Trader Joe’s. So good, we finished the bottle before the wine oxidized!